Quotes by David Leavitt

“Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.”

“[She was] a copy editor, possessed of the rare capacity to sit all day in a small cubicle, like a monk in a cell, and read with an almost penitential rigor.”

“It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.”

“Were an additional $50,000 over budget even before we start,”

“The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer”

“In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.”

“I think its very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse.”

“For one reason or another, this program has never had a national publication.”

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night.

They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.

Everyone had gone to school with someone’s brother or known each other up at Cambridge. These were serious young leftist intellectuals, many of them communists devoted to the idea of a classless society, but they were also upper class and English and so almost unconsciously sought out others of their kind and mixed with them, while the working-class youth stood alone just outside the perimeter of this charmed circle, coming as close as he dared, barred from entry by an invisible boundary of accent.

I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext.

“I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.”